I am on the “Professor Watchlist” - by Carol Lasser

As a member of Historians Against Slavery, I have followed the current post-election situation with great anxiety and much thought about what happens whenthe American political system is under stress. I am grateful to colleagues like Jim Stewart and John Donoghue who share news about ways we can use our academic and intellectual credentials to better understand and undertake resistance.  But please consider for a moment the particular risks we run.

As I learned earlier this week, I am on the  “Professor Watchlist,” the site constructed by “Turning Points USA,” which promotes itself as a “Student Movement for Free Markets and Limited Government.”  Although I consider myself honored to be recognized for my lifelong efforts to teach against racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and many other varieties of oppression, I am deeply distressed by the Watchlist, not only because it may have a chilling effect on academic freedom, but also because it is, like so much in the Age of Trump, fact free, letting loose a barrage of hate based in manipulated emotion. Permit me a brief rant here.

Over a year ago, I was stung by the ill-named Project Veritas because, I suspect, they wanted the person who served as director of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Oberlin. A person posing as a student represented herself as in crisis, saying that her parents had used the Constitution against her when she came out as queer, and seeing the document distributed on campus gave her a trauma. I asked her whether she would like to see a counselor about her trauma, or talk to me about the Constitution.  She chose talking to me.  She insisted that the Constitution was an “oppressive document.”  Like many of us who teach, I tried to help her see different ways to understand that categorization.  But, as I came to realize after a half-hour of conversation, this wasn’t a student in crisis; this was “gotcha journalism.”  You can see some very very carefully edited footage, taken from a hidden camera in her overly tight bustier, on the Project Veritas website.  Can I say that even on camera, I am not shown as advocating a shredding of the Constitution?  But facts no longer matter.

And that is the point.   Indeed, we are all at risk.  Any one of us could be “caught” and ”tried” by the media, whatever you have or have not done.  We need to use our scholarship but also our humanity as we reach out to change hearts and minds.  We need to remind people that facts matter, but also that people matter.  For many years, historians and others talked about “changing the narrative.”  And that is what we need to do.